I’ll keep today’s thought digest short. Over on Notes, I’ve been having an interesting back and forth with Nicholas Carr about whether there can be a digital counterculture. I argue: Yes! Of course there can be. In the last decade alone, we’ve seen at least two digital countercultures evolve, get discovered, and eventually be commercialized. Carr makes an interesting point though, that maybe what I’m describing is more subculture than counterculture. He suggests that a counterculture vis-a-vis the Internet would be the one that rejects the Internet entirely. And while I agree there is certainly a growing “log off” counterculture brewing (as well as an ostensibly profitable cottage industry to go along with it), I think there can be multiple forms of resistance. There are—broadly speaking—two Internets. There’s the subterranean Internet and the normie Internet. The normie Internet, where most of us (myself included) spend our time analyzing and dissecting, is a commercial, social media-driven space. It’s the visible Internet of viral TikToks and Twitter discourse that somehow ends up laundered to your mom two months later. It’s the world of Big Name Creators, paid audiences, sanitized memes, and “nontent”—content that exists just to exist. The subterranean Internet exists beneath all this. It is many things—it’s is everything from private Discord servers to obscure hobbyist spaces. The areas I suspect may be properly countercultural are populated by anonymous users and throwaway accounts, people who actively reject “clout,” and who are hostile to outsiders. It has a higher barrier to entry. It has a certain cruelness to it that doesn’t and can’t fly in commercialized spaces. You have to be pretty deep in the weeds to even know where these communities live. Carr points out that this kind of anonymous, underground culture isn’t new—it was actually the mainstream in pre-web and early web days. His argument is that rather than being a true counterculture that emerged in reaction to today’s internet, it’s more of a subculture that has gone underground as the web became commercialized. He also raises a useful question: does this underground actually pose a threat to commercial Internet culture, or does it just serve as a hidden factory, producing content that eventually feeds back into the mainstream? This is where we differ. While these spaces might share DNA with early web culture, I don’t think it’s either preservation or retreat—it’s rebellion. I’m thinking less about old-school web pioneers or lurkers and more about Gen A and Z users who are actively rejecting the sanitized, corporate Internet they grew up with. They might be inspired by, say, the hacker ethos of the ‘90s or ‘00s, but they’re creating something entirely their own and, again, in reaction to the mainstream. I think they do pose a threat! But whether they get absorbed by the machine, like their predecessors before them, is yet to be seen.
MISSED CONNECTIONSBill: we talked on gchat. I don’t remember where we met. You had a show on public access. I think you might be another Bill, one I’ve seen on Twitter, but I’m not sure. ME AROUND THE WEB
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Keep a civil tongue.